THE SOUND OF FAILURE
How the big three movie musicals of 1964-65 led to the death of the genre
The new film “Saving Mr. Banks” sweeps us back to a golden era in movie musicals. It depicts the making of “Mary Poppins,” one of three singing-dancing extravaganzas of 1964-65 that made that time a commercial home run for the genre.
What “Mr. Banks” doesn’t tell us is what happened directly after that financial boon.
For that, there’s Matthew Kennedy’s justpublished “Roadshow!” (Oxford University Press, , $35). It’s a hilarious, gossipy, but ultimately serious look at how the humongously successful musicals of 1964-65 caused Hollywood to lose e its mind and finance one impossibly bloated film adaptation of a musical after er another.
Besides “Mary Poppins” s” in 1964, the trend also soared on “My Fair Lady” y” (’64) and “The Sound of Music” (’65), the latter of which ranked as the top-grossing film of its day.
The title “Roadshow!” comes from the term movie studios used for hugely expensive promotions in which they opened select films in fancy theaters across the country and charged high ticket prices. For several years after smash roadshows like “The Sound of Music,” moguls green-lit some of the priciest bombs in history, ranging from the Clint Eastwood song-and-dance flop “Paint Your Wagon” to Rex Harrison’s smelly zoo of a movie “Doctor Dolittle,” to Julie Andrews’ epic bore “Star!”
One thing that helped doom these films was the fact that a shocking number of the top actors involved could in no way sing or dance. Hollywood hired tone-deaf Richard Harris to mumble through “Camelot,” Peter O’Toole to aimlessly flap his lips in “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” and Lucille Ball, who could barely croak out a cackle for “Mame.”
“You do have to wonder what they were thinking,” Kennedy tells the Daily News. “There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of thought on this other than to say, ‘Well, it worked for Rex Harrison.’ ”
Of course, non-singer Harrison had a hauteur, a feel for rhythm and a sense of diction that made him a brilliant Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady.” The same didn’t apply to Clint Eastwood, who looked look like he was trying tryin to disappear behind beh the scenery when whe whispering his songs son in “Paint Your Wagon.” Wa
Even E so, Harrison was wa hardly a joy to work wo with. Kennedy ne reports those involved inv in “Doctor Dolittle” Do called him “Tyrannosaurus “T Rex,” Re for his ego fits fit and mean-drunk d outbursts. To T get his way, Harrison H would regularly r threaten to t quit, a move that t could have killed the entire project. pr Harrison was a charmer compared to Lee Marvin, who Kennedy reports “drank to obliteration” on the set of “Paint Your Wagon.” “Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe, leaving 500 years of total blackness, has there been a man like Lee Marvin,” declared “Wagon” director Joshua Logan in a memo dug up by Kennedy.
With relish, Kennedy also details the barbs between Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau during “Hello, Dolly!” “Everyone on this set hates you,” Matthau reportedly told Babs. He added that she was a “pipsqueak who didn’t have the talent of a butterfly’s fart.” Streisand reportedly shot back that he was just jealous because he wasn’t nearly as talented as she. Things got so bad, the director worried the two might walk off the set, forcing a $20 million picture down the toilet.
To her chagrin, Julie Andrews — the star who ignited the whole ’60s mania for musicals with “Mary Poppins” and “Sound of Music” — could never break out of the virginal image those hits saddled her with. Kennedy reports she used to drive around Hollywood with a bumper sticker that read “Mary Poppins is a junkie,” to no avail. She tried playing an edgier role in “Star!,” portraying a woman Kennedy describes as “a bad mother, a bad wife, negligent and egotistical.” But it just made audiences go “eww,” he says.
In the end, it wasn’t only bloated budgets, bad casting and ill-conceived plot lines that killed the ’60s musical. Changing times meant people wanted the grit and reality of films like “The Graduate” or “Easy Rider,” not the infantilized gloss of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” or “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
“Musicals weren’t the center of the culture anymore,” Kennedy says. “And they never would be again.”